toptable.com

Improving bookings by 76% within a year

toptable.com are Europe’s largest restaurant booking site seating 3M diners a year at over 20,000 restaurants across 14 countries. Diners can choose from numerous Michelin-Starred restaurants, celebrity chefs, local bistros and high street chains.

THE CHALLENGE

The toptable.com email programme looked like many others - there was little segmentation or testing resulting in falling booking rates. Another opportunity shown was the large percentage of first time bookers who fail to make an additional booking. If this could be improved then it would make a significant improvement to booking rates.

STAGE 1: LIFECYCLE EMAILS

Emailcenter set-up a number of emails that are automatically triggered at appropriate points throughout the customer lifecycle. These include when a customer joins the site, after a failed booking or a period of time where there have been no bookings.

Each message is automatically generated and specific to the customers point in their lifecycle, including a series of educational welcome messages, booking guarantee messages for failed bookings or a free meal promotion for those who have not made a booking in the last 6 weeks.

STAGE 2: TAILORED NEWSLETTERS

Many customers had the perception that toptable was a London only site, which reduced its potential usage. To address this newsletters were also enhanced with a section specifically tailored to the customers own location. There are up to 3,000 versions which required toptable to automate the build of these with Maxemail. This also allowed toptable to free up resource which was previously building infrequent regional versions.

toptable also has a popular reward points scheme to encourage users to book through the site. The customers balance and a message dependant on their number of points is shown at the top of all the newsletters they receive.

STAGE 3: TESTING

A whole series of tests were drawn up to optimise the email programme further. These included subject line tests, using a personal from name, changing the layout of the message and much more. A control group of customers not receiving the lifecycle emails was also kept to aid the analysis into exactly how many additional bookings this generated.

RESULTS

The lifecycle emails resulted in an immediate uplift in winning back the defected customers. Booking rates for defected diners jumped by 1,600% compared to the generic newsletter. There was also a 400% increase in defected customers becoming loyal regular bookers. Booking rates for new customers receiving the educational welcome emails increased by 10% within the first 3 months of using toptable.

The improved personalisation of the newsletter led to an increase of 50% in bookings compared to the generic version. There was also the added benefit of being able to reduce the frequency of the newsletter. This also led onto additional increases in performance as customers received a more optimal frequency of emails and toptable were able to reduce free meal promotions to the entire database from a frequency of every 4-6 weeks to one every few months, savings costs.

The overall impact of all of these changes led to a 76% increase in bookings within the first year. toptable and Emailcenter were awarded 'Best use of email' at the IDM Business Performance Awards along with a whole host of nominations from the likes of The National Business Awards, Revolution and New Media Age.